Spikeh'd

Despite my growing cynicism towards anything even remotely joyous and celebratory, 2012 has been the best year of my life so far. I married my wonderful wife; celebrated 30 years on the Earth; visited a number of historic landmarks and cities in the UK; spent August travelling through nine American states, sampling a vast array of cuisine and witnessing some amazing sights; and dug my teeth in to a lot of patterns and technology that's really interested me. I've also started on the path to clearing out all of the junk I've accumulated over the past 15 years, which has turned out to be an extremely liberating experience, even if it means I had to bite the bullet and chuck out a vast number of things that "I might use before I die". Fig 1. A shit tip I could prattle on about how awesome married life is, or regale you with my adventures across land and sea, but this isn't one of those god-awful social networking sites whe...

Regular readers will know that I've been working on my new game and film review site for a good while now. I've been spending my spare time in the past few weeks editing the reviews I've written and gathered from friends, which has been a task in itself. Unfortunately, because the site is a bit of a movie and game database as well as a review site, it takes me a while to gather all of the information for each one, so I've not been able to launch with too many published! Suffice to say, I've got a lot more to get through, but when I've caught up I should be able to edit and publish reviews as they come in. All of the reviews I've received will be dealt with ASAP! I've still got a long way to go until version 1 of the site is completely finished. I still have to write the news editing tools and there are lots of additional features I want to implement, like a Facebook login, more products from different sites and RSS feeds. Of course, I've still got ...

As a mercenary developer, I come across programmers from many different walks of life; of all skill levels and abilities with varying levels of enthusiasm. Whilst I'm certainly not perfect (and am always learning), I encounter some who are yet to grasp some of the more basic programming concepts. It's very easy to take a blinkered view of the technologies you're familiar with and to become complacent in your current role or too comfortable with your existing skills. On the other hand, some developers I encounter are far keener than I, and therefore usually far exceed my skill; two things which are directly related. I speak from first hand experience when I say that by taking a step outside of your comfort zone and making even one or two small changes to your daily routine as a developer could seriously improve your general programming knowledge and overall productivity. Although not quite ad-verbatim, I think it was Scott Hanselmann who recently blogged that simply stat...

I've just had a bit of a clean up with the blog - re-tagged most of my older posts and changed the layout slightly. I apologise if any of your readers have been spammed with updates - just ignore them if so :) I've also deleted some of my posts, most notable are the vast majority of the post relating to my bespoke nTier framework. Since I made them, I've made some significant changes, so the old posts don't really represent the end product any more, and will probably just confuse matters. I'm still working on it, and I've made some good progress. I'm also learning a hell of a lot in the process and getting to play with some cool tools like T4 and MVC3, Razor and unobtrusive JQuery. Instead of blogging while I'm writing it, I thought I would develop it as a standalone framework you can download and play with yourself. It's about 85% complete, and although other commitments are taking over at the moment, I'm trying my hardest to get it finished...

I'm sure this isn't hard to get (although I'm not entirely sure how I managed it), but today I opened my email to find a lovely email from the Microsoft Community & Online Support department stating I'd won a Microsoft Community Contributor Award. I got a certificate and everything: I am now "officially" evil. I've not been that active on the ASP.Net forums for a while, but I did recently outline and troubleshoot a bug in Phil Haack's Route Debugger . After commenting, Phil sent me an email and I replied... but I've not heard anything else, so I don't really know :) Either way, it's a nice little addition to the CV and I received a few little benefits from Microsoft - time will tell if they're useful to me or not!

People often complain that contractors get paid too much, whilst they seem to do the same job as permanent developers. As one of those dirty contractors myself, I obviously have a different view on the subject, and via the medium of my blog I would like to attempt to clarify the differences the way I see it. Technology In order to be a successful contractor (or consultant, as I prefer to call myself), you have to be "current". By current, I mean you have to stay up to speed with the latest technologies in your particular field. If you're a fellow .Net developer, I'm sure you're aware that Microsoft are always releasing new software platforms, plug-ins and technologies. Only last week MVC 3 was released and with it a plethora of new development tools . Even if you've landed a contract that could take up the next few years of your working life, by the time you've finished there 43 new versions of Internet Explorer will have been released, and the trendy...